Rally draws crowd at Chicano Park

Carolyn Hileman* | April 10, 2007

SAN DIEGO – Angered by a recent federal crackdown on illegal immigrants, hundreds of people gathered yesterday at Chicano Park to protest house-to-house raids that have created fear in San Diego’s Latino communities.The rally, followed by a peaceful march through Barrio Logan, was organized by student groups and local human rights organizations.

Part of an annual event known as the Zapata march, after Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, the rally was focused on bringing solidarity to a community frightened by what it claims are indiscriminate arrests of immigrants.
“I want attention from the media and the whole community at large to make the ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids stop,” said Adela Lua, representing MEChA at San Diego State University. “They’ve been coming and taking people by force and creating a lot of fear in our community. It needs to end. We can create change; we can stop these raids.”

Federal immigration officials announced that two teams of agents looking for immigration fugitives had arrested 359 people in San Diego and Imperial counties over the past two weeks. Most of those arrested and later deported were not sought by immigration agents but were illegal immigrants who happened to be at the homes where agents had expected their targets would be.

Yesterday’s protest was organized by MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) groups from SDSU, University of San Diego and San Diego City College, as well as a youth group known as Somos Raza, the Raza Rights Coalition and the American Friends Service Committee, a human rights organization.

San Diego police estimated the crowd at 240; event organizers said they counted a little more than 300 people. Officers on motorcycles and in patrol cars helped keep streets clear along the march route as residents and shopkeepers came outside to watch and, in some cases, join the chanting

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